My Other Accounts

serious games

July 23, 2012

I pay close attention to a googlegroup focused on Open Badges (started by a project group at Mozilla Foundation). In the past week, a post there by Kots to a particular discussion topic caught my eye:

I've been coming across the word "gamification". I think this is becoming a very very popular trend!But alas, I would be so so happy to see these "games" offered to... well...lost 21 year old souls such as myself. There are so many perks for K-12 'students'and so many badge opportunities. I grew up playing games, loved them, always will be a gamer.I wish all this was happening when I was dragging my feet through high school, all I recall there being as a form of hope was that running start crap and construction apprenticeships!If you could design some games that would grant 'non-students' some educational perks then,Nushio, you are my hero and I love you!!!!

Designers yearn for input from users. Designers of products and services delivered online have a special challenge in that we are distant from our users in the same ways as traditional product designers, yet we are close to our users because of the nature of the Internet and social media. When a user goes to the trouble to reach out to us designers, we must take note.

June 25, 2012

Even as game-based learning is gaining momentum in many sectors, the activity in higher ed around game-based learning is scant. Sure there are pockets of innovation on many campuses, but broadscale initiatives are nearly impossible to find.

In my role as Analyst with Sage Road Solutions, I have recently completed a scan of the penetration of game-based learning within higher education in the U.S. Highlights include:

October 31, 2011

Beyond their demonstrated effectiveness as a medium for communications and community-building, serious games have great potential to reveal variables that influence audience retention, engagement and loss as well as the impact of various demographic data on those influences. By examining player data, learning organizations and news organizations can gain new insight into the behaviors, motivations and needs of their target audiences.

Fundamentally, a game is a system built around a series of interactions. Sure, the conceit of the game, the storyline, the characters, the graphical treatment, and social components all have a huge influence on a game’s acceptance and popularity. But at the heart of a game’s attraction are its gameplay and its mechanics (aka, dynamics), i.e., the activities a player engages in while playing the game. Activities, of course, are a predetermined set of interactions between the player, the content of the game, and (in the case of multi-player and social games) other players.

As a player progresses through an online game, the choices she makes at each moment of interaction determine her experience of the game and, ultimately, the game’s outcome for her. The game’s internal infrastructure includes a mechanism for tracking her interactions so that the game responds appropriately to her input. Players who make different choices will get different responses from the system, have different experiences and, likely, different outcomes.

Within a game system, players generate data in two categories: gameplay (the log of player interactions) and demography. Generally, gameplay data enable game designers to tune a game, while demographic data inform marketing decisions.

In the world of serious games, where interactions are designed to yield a particular behavioral or cognitive outcome, player data are important in some key ways. They provide an assessment of a player’s overall performance. They point to areas of difficulty (diagnosis) for a player as she progresses through a game. They can also help to predict how a player will perform in similar activities, whether those activities are embedded in another game or take place in the real world.

When gameplay and demographic data from all players are aggregated, we have the opportunity to look for patterns. They might indicate patterns of interaction – desired or not, intended or not – with especially high occurrence rates. Those patterns may, for example, demonstrate the inclination of a particular demographic subset to make the same wrong choice within an activity.

For publishers of multiple games, data aggregation across all games and all players can be particularly informative. Perhaps players who respond positively to one game type are also frequent players of another game type. Players who are successful with one game mechanic or activity type may be completely unsuccessful with a second type.

Ultimately, the value of trapping, aggregating, and analyzing these kinds of data will be extremely significant. Serious game developers will gain a much better understanding of what “works” with their target audiences. Even better, players will have more successful and fulfilling game experiences.

April 21, 2010

Good "search" skills are misundersestimated, to borrow some coinage from our inestimable erstwhile president, George. W. Bush. Indeed, knowing which search engine to use for what purpose and then how to use advanced queries to find useful information can make the difference between an efficient research exercise and a frustrating, potentially unfruitful trial.

Good search is a matter of entering the right question - or key words - into the search field. Finding the proper key words and the proper syntax for joining those words require complex language and logic skills. Effective search also requires enough knowledge of the subject matter to formulate a query that will yield the desired information.

For the most part, Internet users gain search skills over time, through trial and error. Unless you're in library school, you are unlikely to be presented with a tutorial on search techniques. We all just kinda wing it, hoping to find the info we want, presuming it's not available if we don't find it right away.

Last Fall, Google released Search Stories Video Creator. It's a nifty little tool that they've released on YouTube that lets you create narrative around search queries to build a short (very short) movie. Enter seven queries in a sequence, indicate whether you want to search the Web, YouTube, maps, etc., then add a soundtrack - et voilå, your very own little 30-sec. movie. Here's mine (my first one, anyway):

I'm reeling from the scads of ways learning designers can embed this tool into all sorts of curricula. Give learners a topic, and have them tell a story to demonstrate content mastery.

Tell me a story about "metamorphosis."

Recap the story of "To Kill a Mockingbird."

Who's got the best story about "quadratic equation?"

Team A: your group's story is about microlending. Each team member tells a chapter of the story. Each chapter focuses on one key principle. Organize your team. Assign chapters. Tell your story.

There's even a dedicated Search Stories channel on YouTube, with some really fun (and some really not - but they're all PG-rated) examples.

April 23, 2009

This is a really big day for me, and I hope for serious games in general. Today, I'm going to let you in on a secret, but I have to ask you to keep quiet about it. Pinky promise?

We have partnered with Pragmatic Solutions to launch the first (no disrespect to our friends at SGI and the Serious Games Exposed project) portal and distribution site for serious games! Pragmatic, you will remember, is the brains behind America's Army, providing all the back-end infrastructure, the hugely complex real-time analytics engine, and worldwide distribution.

The portal (we'll take name suggestions) provides access to a catalog of games from developers around the world and handles all the e-commerce components for buyers. The deep analytics are available to all serious game developers who join our network. The social networking component enables users to share learning experiences, join game groups or teams, and recommend helpful titles to other users. The advertising network generates co-op revenues that will be shared with developers who opt-in to this feature. Best of all, this service is FREE to game developers/purveyors.

Right now, we are provisioning the system with two things: a massive competencies engine against which we match games; AND, the game system itself.

What does this mean to you? If you are a developer/purveyor of serious games anywhere in the world and have one or more titles that you offer for commercial distribution - even if you offer them for free - we want to hear from you! We are loading the system with as many games as we can during the next six weeks - in preparation for our less-secret announcement coming early this Summer.

Interested parties should contact secrets@imserious.net. Let us know about you and your game(s) - title, subject matter, learning objectives/outcomes, kind of game, number of players, your contact information. We are vetting many titles right now, so don't miss the opportunity to be part of the big announcement.

April 13, 2009

I'm having an increasingly difficult time defining two words that one hears a lot lately, what with the "new economy" and all. More and more of us mid-career (the new euphemism for "middle aged") folks are trying to figure out how to re-invent ourselves to address our "new circumstances," whether due to job or portfolio loss. In the "new economy," we're likely to have to keep doing whatever the "new us" decides on for another 10-25 years longer than we expected to last year, when it was still the "old economy". And let's not forget the unfortunate retirees who were betrayed by the "old economy" and are forced back to the workplace.

So what is retirement (word #1) in the new economy? If the old economy wiped out your savings and your plans for your later years, does that mean retirement is no longer achievable for the middle class?

Many are finding their new circumstances provide the ideal moment to try their hand at starting and operating their own business. Some are hanging out their shingles, seeing greater opportunity in the "gig economy" than in traditional employment.

Are these people entrepreneurs (word #2)? I thought entrepreneurs were folks who are blessed/cursed with a need to be in business for themselves, not people who start businesses because they don't have something else to do. (Interestingly, "entrepreneur" comes from the French "entreprendre," a
verb made up of two parts: "entre", meaning between; and "prendre",
meaning to take. When looked at this way, entrepreneurial activities
might actually be the things we do to fill in the spaces between other
things - like employment.)

While I've been fussing over these ever so important issues, retired 79-year old Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor has been busy with her new venture, "Our Courts". I'll let her explain:

This summer, Our Courts.org will release two games for middle-schoolers, just in time for the new school year. The games, called "Do I Have A Right?" and "Supreme Decision: Freedom of Speech", will each reside within the Our Courts virtual world. The website already has lesson plans and activities for teachers. More resources and more titles are expected in coming months.

Apparently, Justice O'Connor has this entrepreneurial retirement thing figured out. Plus, anybody who gets into videogames in her late 70's definitely has it going on.

April 02, 2009

Perhaps it's the word "summit" that generates expectations too lofty to be achieved. I had dreams of heated conversation about the challenges within and for the serious games industry. I envisioned impassioned discussions about learning design/game design mashups. I was yearning for all the new game concepts that would fuel and challenge us for another year. Such was not to be.

Rather, it was a bit stale and under-attended. Sure, a few more corporate initiatives have been funded, but not for any novel purposes. There were a couple of new tools on the market that claim to make it easier to author/script/develop learning games. But all in all, it was same old same old.

This leaves me with vague unease about where serious games are going - or, better, where the conference is going. My sense is that the company that puts on GDC keeps going to the same people to help them with their programming for serious games. This inevitably self-referential approach effectively eliminates new ideas or new entrants to the discussion.

I raise this point because I've wondered for some time whether a conference focused on the ways technologies for entertainment are used for learning and productivity should be co-located with a conference for game developers. There are great benefits, to be sure, but so many topics get left off the table. Important topics, like achieving the right balance between learning and game play; or, cross-cultural play styles and their impact on serious game design; or, whether music enhances learning equally well in story-driven games as in strategy games.

If you are a serious games professional, are your professional development needs being met? Your professional networking needs? If so, how and where? Inquiring minds want to know.

April 01, 2009

One of the few general sessions I was able to attend at last week's GDC focused on the lack of women in games, both on the player and the creator sides of the equation. As the panelists were speaking about this wretched state of affairs, a silent slide deck ran behind them. The deck was created by Merrilea Mayo (one of the panelists) and Julie Becker, both of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, and offers their analysis of the problem along with their tongue-in-cheek prescription for fixing it.

My solution is a bit more pragmatic. Focus on the part of the industry where there is a huge gap to fill: serious games.

What is the gap? There are not nearly enough learning designers involved in the creation of serious games (for the umpteenth time).

But there are many, many female learning designers, an unquantifiable subset of whom are interested in games and game technologies. By drawing on their learning design expertise while introducing them to game design and production, we are likely to see many benefits: new job opportunities; higher-quality games; and, a stronger industry all around.

March 26, 2009

IBM announced today their new Virtual Service Management Simulator. The game is an immersive 3D learning game which, according to IBM, is "based in a realistic virtual organization where players learn how service management and IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) processes can be applied to significantly improve business performance and increase operational maturity."

The simulator is set within a virtual organization, and presents the "challenges and issues" that each member of the organization face. Players work through the game, building their knowledge of ITIL and service management, then applying new knowledge to process and tool improvements that 1) resolve business pains and 2) drive business success and profitability.

IBM sees this product as appropriate for all levels of service managers.

In a potentially worrying move for small(er), independent serious game developers, IBM is making the title available to all for FREE. It's available as of today. To play online or download, click here.